New Amerykah Part One: 4th World War

The first in a series of pointedly social records from Erykah Badu, this fascinating, sonically adventurous album finds her exploring a post-Civil Rights landscape in which African-Americans have been left to sort out how to have a cultural identity as part of a nation that had, up until very recently, been a dedicated adversary. Madlib, 9th Wonder, and Shafiq Husayn are among the producers.

The American media and public have spent a fair bit of the past months being fascinated and appalled by various remarks from the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, of Chicago. Those months have also seen a fairly warm critical reception for Erykah Badu's terrific new album-- one whose notions and ideologies sometimes come from the same nexus as Wright's. Badu's theology is different, of course: more personal, more scattered, less Christian, laced with Five-Percenter notions. And Badu salutes Farrakhan explicitly, rather than just nodding politely across the South Side. But there's an odd echo in her wording on that one: "I salute you, Farrakhan/ Because you are me." Less than a month after this record's release, Wright's most notable acquaintance was describing the reverend as someone who "contains within him the contradictions-- the good and the bad-- of the community.... I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community." He is me? Until he hits the press club, anyway.

New Amerykah is the first in a series of pointedly social records from Badu, and "you are me"-- or maybe we arewe-- could be its motto, or possibly its intended effect. I don't bring up politics for nothing. That attitude, and a lot of the record's concerns, have their roots in the same era that animates Rev. Wright-- those Civil Rights and post-Civil Rights moments when African-Americans were left with some strange, heavy tasks: sorting out how to have a cultural identity as part of a nation that had, up until very recently, been a dedicated adversary, and sorting out how to clean up the wreckage that had accumulated in the meantime. A lot of the critical love for New Amerykah seems rooted in a love for the music of that period-- a time in which popular black artists made records filled not only with visionary, avant-garde sounds, but with a social expansiveness, a fire and ambition to say something important to and for a community. Reviews put this record in a line with those artists: Sly Stone, Marvin Gaye, Miles Davis, Stevie Wonder, Funkadelic; you could tie it even more easily to a lot of smart-guy late-80s hip-hop digging into the same ideas. Nobody who's been paying attention will be surprised at the thought of that mantle being picked up by a woman.

This album doesn't just have the personal and social ambitions of those old records-- plenty of charmless "nu-soul" records aspire to that-- but some of the sonic ones, too. Big tracks aside, it's an awfully static record, which gives it the kind of high-art "difficulty" that we critics have been known to like. The beats, by hip-hop producers like Madlib, 9th Wonder, and Shafiq Husayn, trail sneakily by, leaving Badu-- without the aid of verses, choruses, or much structure at all-- to scribble all over them in her perfect/imperfect voice. (One track, "My People", is mostly just a repeated mantra; the rest of Badu's vocal scribbling is buried far back in the mix, like an incidental decoration.) These things should pose problems; one of the chief wonders of New Amerykah is that they don't. Instead, they allow for a sense of intimacy and freedom. At the end of one already-great track, there's an offhand doodle that's one of the most amazing pieces of music I've heard all year: It's just Badu, with some chatter in the background, singing her mother's history in unison with a muted trumpet. But you can hear the two musicians working happily to stay in unison, all through a complex jazz run, even trying to match their vibratos; you can imagine the takes where they miss it and laugh a little. It makes a little joke, and it closes on a terrific line about her mother's resilience-- "Even though it was hard, you would never ever know it"-- and in the end I can't think of a nobler use for recording equipment.

It's those personal moments that sell things, even more so than in Badu's back catalog; credit usually goes to her gift of a voice, which she uses impressionistically instead of composing, but it's always been her keen writing about people that gives her tracks much of their shape. The trumpet comes at the end of a track called "Me", which despite the title is more candid than narcissistic-- a gorgeous, sunny, soft-soul beat over which Badu sings about getting older, getting thicker, having two kids with different fathers. That candor is also a lot of what sells Badu's social concerns, which could otherwise sound like a laundry list of black-community struggles: poverty, urban violence, bad policing, AIDS, the psychological hard spot of teenage girls, complacency, and get-mine nihilism versus hope for something else. These things get filtered through Badu's head into real scenery instead of placeholders, and folded in among other things that seem remarkably sincere and personal: mourning for the late producer J Dilla, an earnest belief in hip-hop as a uniting culture, and that we is we attitude. Even the beats wind up feeling earnest. The bulk of them are dark, blunted, woozy, and paranoid; the exceptions are light, breezy, calm. But all of them feel like walking out onto an empty big-city sidewalk in the hours after sunrise, when everything's chilly, dewy, and strange.

There are times, as the album drags on, where that static darkness really does become a problem-- where the record begins to seem indulgent, half-finished, or slapped together. Part of the marvel of it, though, is how she still pulls this off, every bit of it, on sheer...Baduizm: Even when she seems wrong, or dippy, or maybe a little batty, she's still a ridiculously compelling and likable personality. This is something no one should criticize in music: recognizable, complex, three-dimensional character. Neither should we be too skeptical about people inclined to laud this as a strong new flash of old-style, socially engaged r&b: Those ambitions are worth praising, and those eras worth looking back on, so long as it doesn't come along with the mean-spirited, bad-faith complaint that "all" of today's black music is "just about guns/sex/money," or with this free-floating idea that the experiences of black people must always be treated as a socio-political "issue". Badu's difficult and complicated, and not even in a self-absorbed way-- it makes for good, deep records and shows that'll never start on time. ("Time is for white people," she recently joked to Blender, one-upping the old line about running on African Time.) I don't know if we're still voting for public policy based on who we'd rather have a beer with, but it occurs to me that I don't know many people who wouldn't love to grab a drink with Badu.